In this post I’ll outline a method for building a business starting with just a blog. It is inspired by Ryan Deiss’s new product. I am not affiliated with Ryan Deiss and am not promoting his product, but it’s a good value if you want to get it, and is reasonably priced.
As I always say in this blog and my other articles, start by choosing a topic you like and can write in it. In this example I’ll pick the topic of building muscles. Start by just choosing the main topic then move to the keyword research later.
The reason keyword research is not the first step any more is because of the EMD update of Mr. big G that ruined it for all affiliate marketing blogs that use this exact match domain method. Not totally, but it’s harder than it used to be.
The domain should include the keyword building muscles though. And that’s it for now. Go to namecheap.com and buy your domain (costs around $10/year). After you do that come back to do the next step.
After you have your domain now you need to host it. You can use hostgator.com and the coupon code MO101BLOGMONEYPOST to get the first month for free just to try the method, or if you are serious you can buy a long term hosting from iPage Web Hosting for only $2.25/mo!! it’s cheaper on the long term.
From your iPage or hostgator account contact technical support and ask them to help you host your new domain. Be clear about your wish to “host” the domain and not “transfer it” to them.
The reason I recommend you buy the domain from name cheap is that you don’t want your domain and host to be the same company. If anything goes wrong with the hosting you can get another hosting and take your domain with you. Domains that come with the hosting are usually owned by the hosting company and transferring them is a real pain. So from the beginning have your domain separate.
Again stop reading, go do this step, and come back after you’re done.
Now from the control panel in hostgator click fantastico (a light blue smiley face) and install “WordPress” on your hosting. If you have chosen iPage use “Weebly” to build your website (it uses WordPress too, but with cool themes and is way easier than the manual way). Again contact technical support if you need help, they’ll be more than happy to help you start.
Important: Don’t choose admin as your login name. Use anything else to make the hacker’s job harder.
Get the blog built and come back for more steps.
Now you need to set up your blog. Go to yourdomain.com/wp-admin and enter the user name and password you’ve chosen while building your blog. And this is where you’ll be doing all the work from.
Go to “settings” and choose “permalinks”. Change that to /%category%/%postname%/
Now go to posts and delete the “hello world” post, or edit it if you want, but in that case delete the comment that came with it.
Go to pages, and make these pages: About, Contact, Privacy.
Go to plugins and install “all in one SEO”, “Nebula Facebook Comments”, “Slick Social Share Buttons”, and “Google XML Sitemaps”.
Fianlly go to iContact and sign up for the smallest package (you can upgrade as you grow). Set up a mailing list and get the sign up form code, copy it and paste it on your site in the widgets area. Offer your subscribers a valuable piece of content (a pdf file will do it) and ask them to sign up to your newsletter to get it.
Now your website is ready to work for you. Start posting about your subject and don’t worry much about your keywords, we’ll work on that later.
Now after you have like 5-10 general articles in your subject it’s time to work on making money. Go to Google keyword planner and search for keywords related to your subject that include a buyer’s intention. For our example of building muscles I’d search for keywords related to nitric oxide side effects.
A person looking for nitric oxide side effects is likely to be in the buying decision mode but wants to make sure he’s not going to be hurting himself with it. Gather low search volume keywords related to nitric oxide side effects and use them all to make a post title, headers, picture alt tags, bold and italicized phrases etc.
Make sure to include all of them in the description box provided by All in one SEO plugin, in the keywords box, and in the tags.
Monetize this post with an advertising for nitric oxide supplement from a CPA network.
Get back links for this post and to the home page. The best back links to get are from relevant pages with a high PR. The second best is to find a high PR blog, write a good article about nitric oxide and include a link to your post and offer it to be published on that site as a guest post. A post on a high PR site can get a high PR itself fast and pass it to your site.
Do that every day and keep your content useful to the users. If they like your content they’ll probably spread the word for you, which means high quality traffic for free.
Also make sure you are advertising something that provides a high value to your readers. If they don’t like it you’ll find a viral Facebook campaign to ruin your blog’s reputation. Respect your readers and they’ll make you money.
Those backlinks that you are building by guest posting will eventually pass linke juice to your site and you’ll get a PR of your own. At this point start contacting the top names in your industry, in our example famous body builders and ask them to either write something for you, provide a video footage, or a skype (or phone, or in person) interview.
After you get each piece of such celebrity content get a press release from erelease and spread the word. Make sure you have the viral tools set up, by which I mean the social sharing buttons as in the plugins step.
From the response to these pieces of valuable contents you can choose one of those stars to author or co-author a product that you can sell to your readers.
And/or you can get those celebrities to provide you with monthly content and issue your own paid newsletter with a monthly subscription and offer it as an upgrade to your list of subscribers. This is a recurring monthly income.